Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (68 page)

He played the Shadow with a flippancy that kept the other participants on their toes. In the same breath he seemed both to relish and to mock his hokey dialogue. His irony and good humor were infectious. “One time he got to the middle break,” recalled actor and writer Sidney Slon, “and he said, ‘Hey, this is a hell of a script. How does it end?’ ” Another time, Orson rushed breathlessly into the studio and dashed up to the microphone, whipping out his copy of the script so fast the pages flew out of his hands and fanned onto the floor. “There was consternation in the control room,” recalled series announcer Ken Roberts. “Fear on the faces of the musicians. Everybody was terribly upset. Suddenly, Orson merely smiled, reached into his pocket and took out another script. The whole thing had been planned to frighten the director.”

The series pitted the Shadow’s powers of hypnosis and telepathy against deadly criminals, who were often deranged, fanatical, or endowed with superpowers. Orson never wrote or directed the far-fetched scripts, but his star contract gave him script and casting input, and
The Shadow
incorporated many actors drawn from Orson’s burgeoning theater and radio career: Chubby Sherman, Whitford Kane, Martin Gabel, Everett Sloan, Ray Collins, and Agnes Moorehead, who had a regular supporting role as Lamont Cranston’s “friend and constant companion, the lovely Margo Lane.”

Although he liked to pretend otherwise, Orson even graced the occasional rehearsal. “I remember him arriving for work one morning,” stage and screen director Elia Kazan wrote in
Elia Kazan: A Life.
(A stage player during that period, famous for his role in
Waiting for Lefty
, Kazan also performed parts in radio.) “He’d been up all night carousing but looked little the worse for it and was full of continuing excitement. A valet-secretary met him at the side of the stage with a small valise containing fresh linen and the toilet articles he needed. The rehearsal was never interrupted—Orson had unflagging energy and recuperative powers at that time—and he soon looked as good as new. There was no swagger of aesthetic guilt there.

“
The Shadow
was not patronized, only slightly kidded, and this affectionately,” Kazan continued. “It was a way of making a good living at the time and no disgrace. . . . Seldom have I been near a man so abundantly talented or one with a greater zest for life.”

Some accounts insist that the network kept secret the name of the actor playing the Shadow in order to heighten the mystery for listeners, but Orson’s participation was well known; indeed, it was part of his value to the sponsors. (
Radio Daily
even complained, “Orson Welles does not come up to [other] actors who have played the part in the past.”) To devotees of his twenty-six episodes, the season from September 1937 to March 1938—known to fans as “the Orson Welles season”—Orson was the best Shadow. And his one-year stint reinvigorated the series, opening the door to fifteen years of future Shadows.

It seemed miraculous to Orson’s friends and coworkers that he was managing to compress so much activity into his life. Young Orson was like a magician, with a top hat and cape full of cards, objects, and furry animals, dazzling you with one trick even as he was barreling on to the next.

The very same week as
Julius Caesar
’s splendid premiere, Orson launched the first rehearsals for
The Shoemaker’s Holiday.
He had prepared the production in New Hampshire, taking pencil and scissors to Thomas Dekker’s comedy, which wove together earthy humor and sentimental romance in telling the story of a jolly shoemaker’s rise to lord mayor of London. First performed on New Year’s Eve 1599,
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
was rarely produced in the modern era, and it never had been staged in New York. (The play’s real claim to fame was the poem “The Merry Month of May,” which Orson knew from boyhood.) Orson’s revision shrank the play to half its length, breaking up long speeches into bursts of overlapping dialogue, and turning the plot into a locomotive of action and bawdy humor that would last less than ninety minutes.

Orson’s set design partitioned the stage into three areas, each screened by its own curtain. A London street would occupy center stage, with the side stages given over to the shoemakers’ guildhall and the jolly shoemaker’s shop. The set of
Julius Caesar
could be transformed for
Shoemaker’s Holiday
by rotating the main platform on wheels. Set designer Sam Leve recalled that the “major design concept” came to Welles one day when they were riding together in a taxi. When the cab stopped at a fruit stand, Orson looked at the boxes and asked him, “Did you ever do a show with orange crates?”

Leve did so now, with natural burlap and canvas too, draping the stage with a cyclorama to conceal the blood-red back wall of
Caesar.
(Again, the program read “Staged by Orson Welles,” with no mention of Leve.) The costumes would be homespun too; Orson told designer Millia Davenport that the men ought to wear huge codpieces, a touch actors and audiences alike found hilarious. (In “a downward transposition of his false noses,” Peter Conrad wrote, some of the codpieces simulated erections.)

Again, as with
Horse Eats Hat
, Orson wanted plenty of music. Composers Virgil Thomson and Marc Blitzstein were overbooked, so he hired Lehman Engel, who had handled the orchestration for
The Second Hurricane
and
The Cradle Will Rock.
(Engel was also using the Mercury Theatre stage on Sunday afternoons for his New York Madrigal Society recitals.) To honor the repertory theater concept, Orson asked for incidental music—drinking songs and jigs, transitions and effects—composed for the same instruments and musicians involved in
Julius Caesar.

“Often he tapped out rhythms,” Engel said, “and no less often described the quality of the melody and the number of measures needed. The production that resulted from this method was always one very definite idea made up of the scenery he had designed, the play he had revised, the acting he had postulated in great detail, and the accompanying twiddles he had indicated.”

While retooling Dekker’s play, Orson also created parts for people he wanted to be surrounded by while working on the play. “Have you ever cast a friend instead of the right person for a part?” Peter Bogdanovich asked him during their interview sessions. Frequently, Welles replied. “Would you do it again?” asked Bogdanovich. “Yes,” declared Welles.

Whitford Kane, the onetime leading actor of the Goodman Theatre, was someone “we had always thought of as one of the company,” according to John Houseman, but Orson had never directed Kane onstage. Now he cast Kane as Simon Eyre, the ascendant Lord Mayor. Chubby Sherman would get a showcase for his buffoonery as the journeyman cobbler Firk, who wore a fool’s cap and sagging tights with an ill-fitting codpiece that swung around when he did. “Firk was promoted to the one who was always going up to the quality and insulting them, or talking back to his master,” Sherman recalled. “Orson built up my part so that I’d end a scene. Rather than having a thing in the middle, he made a curtain [closer] out of it. It was all very flattering.”

Joseph Cotten was handed the romantic role of the shoemaker pursuing a nobleman’s daughter. Good supporting parts were set aside for George Coulouris, Norman Lloyd, John Hoysradt, Francis Carpenter, William Mowry Jr., Elliott Reid, Stefan Schnabel, and Arthur Anderson—all from the
Julius Caesar
cast. Smaller billed roles went to William Alland and to Richard Wilson, another bright young fellow who had joined Orson’s “slave” brigade.

A few new players “from the ordinary marts of the commercial theater,” in the words of the
New York Times
, also joined the company—foremost among them Vincent Price, who accepted less than his customary wages to play the ill-fated bridegroom Master Hammon. Price’s star was on the rise after his debut opposite Helen Hayes in
Victoria Regina
in late 1935, and his recruitment reflected the Mercury’s growing cachet.

This time, Orson would play no part himself; he was “merely” directing. Whether because he was carrying a lighter load here than on
Julius Caesar
, or because the play itself was such a merry romp, the director’s mood was playful and contagious. “Whereas
Caesar
depressed both actors and crew,” wrote Andrea Janet Nouryeh, “
Shoemaker
lifted them up.”

As with that other farce,
Horse Eats Hat
, Orson demanded headlong pacing for the play—a mode that came naturally to him in real life and that characterized much of his best work (with some contemplative exceptions, such as
The Magnificent Ambersons
). He wanted the dialogue to snap and zing. “He loved you to bite the cue,” recalled Arthur Anderson, the teenage Lucius from
Julius Caesar
, now “A Boy” in
Shoemaker’s Holiday.
“Everything had to mesh, go together. You didn’t finish a speech that someone else wasn’t on top of you—all the time.” Orson could be a martinet in enforcing the machine-gun pacing, snapping his fingers and blocking the action so precisely that some of his actors—even Chubby Sherman, who complained about this in interviews—felt he inhibited their comic spontaneity. His staging depended “on the precise machine-like interplay of movement, music, curtains and light,” said Lehman Engel. “The actors were his puppets.”

Quite a few members of the cast performed double duty, appearing in six nighttime performances (and one matinee) of
Julius Caesar
each week, then rehearsing
Shoemaker’s Holiday
after the curtain fell—until dawn. Orson was on a treadmill of his own, with
The Shadow
and
The March of Time
taking up any free time not already devoted to
Caesar
or
Shoemaker’s Holiday.
He rarely made it home to Sneden’s Landing, stealing sleep in hotels or snoozing overnight at the theater.

Seven weeks after the
Julius Caesar
premiere—late at night on Christmas Day, after a sold-out performance—Orson stepped forward, still in costume as Brutus, and silenced the applause.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced in his grand manner, “we are going to give you a full performance, with lights, scenery and costumes, of
Shoemaker’s Holiday.
You are all welcome to stay, free of charge.” For those who might want a break before the show, he noted, “there’s a coffee and donut shop across the way, or there’s Longchamps down the street.” For the rest, “We’ll leave the curtain up and show you how we change the set; perhaps some of the actors will come out and talk to you . . .” The spectators were encouraged to call their friends and invite them to come and join the crowd. The performance would begin at midnight.

So it did, at twelve o’clock sharp, with Lehman Engel’s first musical fanfare. Hundreds had stayed and many more arrived, cramming into the theater, including a few critics drawn by the bait. Within minutes of the opening scene, as Houseman recalled later, the company knew they had another hit in their portfolio. The free public preview was the “wildest triumph imaginable,” recalled Norman Lloyd, who was playing one of the apprentice shoemakers. “The show was a smash during its run—but never again did we have a performance like that one.”

The official opening came a week later, in the evening on New Year’s Day—the 388th anniversary of the play’s debut in front of Queen Elizabeth I in 1599, as the Mercury’s publicity releases noted. The reviews, if anything, were more exultant than those for
Julius Caesar.
Richard Watts Jr. of the
New York Herald Tribune
hailed the fast and funny adaptation as “the great comfort of the season.” Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
called it “an uproarious comic strip.” Sidney B. Whipple in the
New York World-Telegram
found the production splendid and brilliant—declaring it a genuine act of theatrical courage. “Triumph for Orson Welles,” read the
Journal and American
headline.

Not only had Orson resuscitated Thomas Dekker for the modern age; he had also fulfilled two long-standing ambitions: to direct Whitford Kane and to elevate Chubby Sherman, Kane’s life partner, to stardom. Sherman was the embodiment of the play’s rowdy merriment. (Even his character’s name, “Firk,” sounded like “fuck” when said quickly—a running joke enhanced by the breakneck production.) Sherman proved “a clown of the first order,” wrote Brooks Atkinson, and his appearance in
Shoemaker’s Holiday
won the actor “with a golden disposition and a continuous grin” his first feature profile in the
New York Times.

In hindsight, some students of Welles’s theatrical career have described the triumphant Thomas Dekker comedy, following closely on the heels of
Julius Caesar
, as the zenith of the Mercury Theatre—“a success never recovered,” in the words of Simon Callow. Ticket sales skyrocketed, and for a few weeks the Mercury rotated the two dissimilar plays. By the month’s end, however, both of them were moved to the National Theatre, two blocks north, where the Mercury management could sell twice as many orchestra seats to the usual Broadway audiences while still offering big blocks of tickets to the left-wing and educational organizations that were its mainstay.

This was Houseman’s practical idea, and at first it was opposed by Orson and just as vigorously criticized by “a voluble minority” of the company, in Houseman’s words, including Chubby Sherman. (“I have never been able to decide whether it was wise or foolish” to expand the production to another, bigger theater, Houseman wrote, “whether it aided the Mercury or helped destroy it.”) The play schedule now varied slightly every week, depending on ticket sales and Orson’s obligations. He had a night off from acting every time the Mercury performed
The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

Virginia Welles spent most of November and December in Sneden’s Landing. For the few friends who might not have heard their news, the Welleses sent out a holiday card decorated with one of Orson’s sketches, showing their cocker spaniel, Budget, sitting on her haunches, with Virginia and Orson standing in profile, gazing off the page into the future. Orson’s figure showed long scruffy hair over his brow. Virginia’s showed a tummy bump.